Project Management has its roots in history spanning thousands of years. Depictions from the Egyptian era show unique organizational ways that they accomplished some of the monumental tasks they set out to accomplish. In 1857, the building of the Pacific Railroad documented engineers and clerks identifying formal reports and other information that passed through to those managers in the field – basically functioning as a project management office. More modern project management methods were developed in the United States specific to the Militaries implementation of CPM/PERT methodologies (Kawk, 2003). Aspects of project management transcend time and provide brief glimpses into the organizational livelihoods of days gone past – nowadays, those methods and know how are contained in the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK®).
The PMBOK provides many useful requirements that are based around project management needs. Here at Tuned Into Violin, we are all about the Violin all of the time, but many people who play may be hobbyists who just enjoy the instrument which means people may have a different profession that are not the violin, and in that regard, project management methodology might actually translate well to the tasks involved in that specific profession. Organized and consistent habits help any job related function even if its not project related so no matter where a person falls on the job type spectrum, these concepts have some use. With that being the case, the PMBOK® provides the knowledge areas and requirements to learn/understand the different project management concepts that are useful for majority of projects.
The PMBOK® is maintained by the Project Management Institute, a non-profit dedicated to helping individuals and businesses succeed through their project management success. They formulate updates, revisions, and new methods through research, evaluation, and consensus of those changes through committees comprised of longstanding project professionals.
In the book, it details out these aspects of the project management lifecycle:
- 5 Process Groups
- 10 Knowledge areas
5 Process groups refers to the project life cycle of initiation, planning, executing, monitoring and control and close out. The 10 knowledge areas are tools utilized to provide maintain the project task velocity (how fast tasks can be completed). This includes standard things like scope, time and cost. It also gets into items such as quality and integration which goes into how to bring the different parts of a project together – especially if deliverables come from multiple different teams.
Utilizing the PMBOK® for project management just means taking the tools, techniques, knowledge areas, and processes and applying them to real world application. This aspect can be difficult for people to achieve because it comes with learning a new skillset, and as anything, learning something new requires effort. This rings true with the violin as well. Practice logs on their own are good for identifying what happens in the moment, and they can be a quick way to document things. But how does the practice log get broken down into enough detailed parts to create focused practice? The methodologies defined in project management can assist with breaking down a structure of milestones, tasks and how-to options that provide greater context to the goals that are being accomplished. In the project management world, this breakdown is called the work breakdown structure, and it keeps you on pace towards the end goal.
As you can see, everything that we might do in the organizational sense has a name. That name generally has roots in different process improvement methodologies – one being Project Management. The PMBOK® provides a guide towards understanding the names of common practices that are done to maintain an organized approach to completing milestones, and its use can be taken advantage of to learn the violin.
SOURCES CITED:
Kawk, Young. 2003. Brief History of Project Management.
https://home.gwu.edu/~kwak/PM_History.pdf
Shenhar, A. & Dvir, D. (2004).
Project management evolution: past history and future research directions. Paper presented at PMI® Research Conference: Innovations, London, England. Newtown Square, PA: Project Management Institute.
